On its website, the EU Commission pretends that ACTA “is not SOPA”. This is correct. In some important ways, ACTA is worse than SOPA. ACTA is the global blueprint for repressive laws such as SOPA:

ACTA is the inspiration for SOPA/PIPA in the US. While SOPA may have been put aside for a moment, ACTA is a global agreement negotiated outside of democratic arenas and meant to be imposed globally. Moreover, if SOPA were to be adopted, the US Congress could amend or abrogate it. ACTA will prevent the EU and its Member States as well as other signatories to change their copyright and patent laws, and to fix their broken and brutal enforcement policies to adapt to the new economy of sharing.

If ACTA is adopted, it will be possible for the entertainment industry to exert pressure on every Internet actor under threat of criminal sanctions (art.23). Intermediaries will thus be forced to deploy (art.27) automated blocking, filtering of communications and deletion of content online. Such measures will inevitably restrict users' freedoms online.

ACTA's call for “cooperation” between rights-holders and Internet service providers is also advocated by the European Commission as “extra-judicial measures” and “alternative to courts”. This means that police (surveillance and collection of evidence) and justice missions (penalties) could be handed out to private actors, bypassing judicial authority and the right to a fair trial. By defending this SOPA-style policy in ACTA, the Commission is paving the way for the copyright industries' enforcement agenda, preventing any true debate on alternative to repression. This fits with the announced revision of the IPRED and eCommerce directives.

See also La Quadrature's analysis of the final text of ACTA's digital chapter.

1. “ACTA is important for the EU's external competitiveness, growth and jobs as well as to the safety of citizens”

ACTA is a direct by-product of the lobbying offensive launched in 2004 by the International Chamber of Commerce, presided by the then CEO of Vivendi-Universal Jean-René Fourtou, whose wife acted as EU Parliament rapporteur for the IPR Enforcement Directive (IPRED) adopted the same year. It is one of the worst examples of private interests taking over policy-making.

ACTA may have been negotiated like other trade agreements, but it is not just a trade agreement on tariffs. Instead, ACTA generalizes extreme civil sanctions and broadens the scope of criminal sanctions.

Binding the EU to such outdated models, and deploying schemes that can be used as anti-competitve weapons will only hamper innovation, competition and growth. Not only in the digital economy, but in many fields which rely on the free sharing of knowledge, from agriculture to healthcare.

There was never any impact assessment on the need for such an plurilateral agreement. The Commission never proved that tougher enforcement standards worldwide would actually benefit the EU's public interest, much less the rest of the world's.

Instead of imposing ACTA to developing countries, the EU should urgently look at the broader consequences of its current policies (EUCD, IPRED) on innovation, access to culture and fundamental rights, and reform these policies to lay the foundation of a true knowledge-based economy.

Contrary to the Commission's claims, transparency on ACTA was only made possible after negotiation documents were leaked by insiders worried of ACTA's consequences. These leaks forced the negotiators to release negotiation texts in the Spring of 2010, more than 3 years after the beginning of the negotiations.

The negotiation and implementation of ACTA bypasses legitimate international organizations (WTO, WIPO) where copyright, patent and trademarks policy are discussed. This is all the more unacceptable considering that a growing number of countries understand the importance of reforming these policies by breaking away from blind repression.

2. “ACTA is a balanced agreement, providing adequate protection to sectors in need, while safeguarding the rights of citizens and consumers”

Safeguards in the text are purely generic and declarative, mostly in the general parts of the agreement, where enforcement provisions, generally vaguely worded, are binding to signatories. For instance, a study by legal professors Kroff and Brown stresses that ACTA “overall significantly strengthens enforcement measures (especially criminal law ones), without any of the safeguards and exceptions needed to ensure a balance of interests between right holders and parties”.

The Commission says ACTA does not go further than the EU acquis, but leading EU legal scholars have made clear that on important points it does: in particular on criminal measures, for which there is no EU acquis, and on border measures and damages.

The letter of ACTA may not be contrary to the eCommerce directive, EUCD or IPRED, but strengthens them and prevents EU lawmakers from amending them on crucial points.

The overall logic of ACTA's digital chapter paves the way for extra-judicial measures, similar to those of SOPA and PIPA, whereby rights holders and ISPs or financial service providers would “cooperate” to take “measures” against alleged infringements that could only amount to censorship mechanisms, bypassing due process and the right to a fair trial.

This reading is comforted by the criminal sanctions provided for “aiding and abetting” infringements (art. 23.4). Such concerns are also accentuated by the EU Commission's IPR strategy and the current overhaul of the IPRED and eCommerce directive.

3. “ACTA is about adequately enforcing existing intellectual property rights, but does not create new rights”

ACTA modifies the scope of criminal sanctions in EU Member States, ensuring they will be applied for cases of infringement on a “commercial scale”, defined as “direct or indirect economic or commercial advantage” (art. 23.1). This term is vague, open to interpretation, and just plainly wrong when it comes to determining the scope of proportionate enforcement, as it does not make any distinction between commercial and non-profit infringement. Widespread social practices, like not-for-profit file-sharing between individuals, as well as editing a successful information website or distributing innovative technological tools, could be interpreted as “commercial scale”.

By extending the scope of criminal sanctions for “aiding and abetting” to such “infringement on a commercial scale”, ACTA will create legal tools threatening any actor of the Internet. Access, service or hosting providers will therefore suffer from massive legal uncertainty, making them vulnerable to litigation by the entertainment industries.

The Presidency of the Council of the EU (representing the 27 Member States governments) had to negotiate ACTA in conjunction with the Commission. The Presidency negotiated the “criminal sanction” chapter of ACTA, which could not be negotiated by the Commission as criminal law is part of Member States' competencies. This illustrates that there is no EU acquis on criminal sanctions and proves that ACTA does change EU law.

Beyond broadening the scope of copyright, patent and trademarks enforcement, ACTA establishes new procedural rules favouring the entertainment industries. These procedures will have a dramatic chilling effect on potential innovators and creators, especially considering ACTA's insane damage provisions (during a trial, right holders will be able to submit their preferred form of damage computation, see art. 9.1).

In the future, ACTA's scope could also be easily expanded through the “ACTA committee”. The latter will have authority to interpret and modify the agreement after it has been ratified, and propose amendments. Such a parallel legislative process, which amounts to signing a blank check to the ACTA negotiators, would create a precedent to durably bypassing parliaments in crucial policy-making, and is unacceptable in a democracy. This alone should justify that ACTA be rejected.

4. “ACTA has a broad coverage, so as to protect all European creators and innovators, through a broad range of means”

China, Russia, India and Brazil, countries where most of counterfeiting is produced, are not part of ACTA, and have stated publicly that they will never be. Considering the widespread opposition to ACTA, the agreement has lost any legitimacy on the international stage.

Again, the Commission has not even proved the need for new enforcement measures nor that existing TRIPS measures are not enough.

The Commission keeps stepping up repression, when in many instances counterfeiting is at its core a market failure due to the inadequacy of IPR holders' business models and contracts. At the same time, no EU Commission initiative exists to take a positive approach on discussing new financing models for the culture economy fit for the digital environment.

Geographical indications – a key point for Europe's small businesses and cultural heritage – are mostly excluded from ACTA. The few references to geographical indications in ACTA will have no or very little effect on third countries' national law.

Get in touch with Members of the EU parliament and make sure they know what ACTA is really about. Visit our our dedicated campaign page.

FFII has also drafted a detailed response to another EU Commission document on ACTA called “10 myths about ACTA”.

As Wayne Rash wrote earlier this week, "ACTA is, in effect, a treaty, negotiated in secret by the U.S. Trade Representative, Ron Kirk... Until recently, the actual text of ACTA was so secret that only a few lawyers outside of the White House and the USTR offices had actually seen it. And those people were required to sign non-disclosure agreements."

What ACTA Is

The goal of ACTA, says the Electronic Frontier Foundation (EFF) is "to create a new standard of intellectual property enforcement above the current internationally-agreed standards in the TRIPs Agreement and increased international cooperation including sharing of information between signatory countries' law enforcement agencies."

The EFF backgrounder also provides some insight to ACTA. While President Obama is carrying the torch for ACTA right now, the treaty goes back to October 2007 (or farther) when the U.S., Japan, Switzerland and the European Community said they'd be working on a new intellectual property enforcement treaty.

ACTA isn't the only area where (as the EFF puts it) "copyright industry rightsholder groups have sought stronger powers to enforce their intellectual property rights... to preserve their business models." But it is getting closer to reality.

The word is that ACTA probably doesn't change U.S. law. Probably? Nobody's entirely sure. But as Techdirt calls out "it certainly does function to lock in US law, in a rapidly changing area of law, where specifics are far from settled." It also, of course, serves to dictate compliance in other countries.

Why ACTA Is Unacceptable

ACTA was negotiated in secret – For me, this is reason enough to oppose any legislation or regulation. I don't care if it's the "Hugs for Puppies and Kittens Act," if people aren't given an opportunity to engage with their lawmakers about a law, it shouldn't be enacted.

Ridiculous damages – ACTA specifies "presumptions for determining damages" that basically assume that all of the infringed goods had sold. To put it another way, ACTA takes the position that if a user uploads a song to a file-sharing network, damages should be calculated as if the recipients would have paid for the work in question. This is ridiculous, as has been explained any number of places. Many people who download illicit copies would simply never have purchased the work in question had it not been available for free.

It may be unconstitutional – The Obama administration is claiming that ACTA not a treaty, but an "executive agreement" and thus not subject to legislative approval. As Rash notes in his eWeek piece, Congress does not agree.

It's over-broad – It's worth noting that not all of ACTA is necessarily bad. Some of the agreement is targeted at countering counterfeit goods that may be actively harmful, like counterfeit prescription drugs. But ACTA goes well beyond single areas of intellectual property and essentially tries to bear-hug everything IP-related. Not good.

The ACTA committee is not accountable – ACTA creates a body outside of national and even international bodies, called the "ACTA Committee." (At least the name is honest.) The committee would not be accountable to the people governed by the agreement. Folks in the United States can vote out Lamar Smith and others who endorsed SOPA/PIPA, but we would have no real influence on the ACTA Committee.

No fair use provisions – As this opinion on ACTA by Eddan Katz and Gwen Hinze notes, ACTA would "export one half of the complex U.S. legal regime" but "without accompanying exceptions and limitations." In short, ACTA would not include fair use provisions and such that we expect in the U.S.

Criminalizes what used to be a civil offense – An opinion prepared by Douwe Korff and Ian Brown notes, "ordinary companies and individuals could be criminalised for innocent activities or trivial breaches of copyright, or for technical breaches that serve a wider, overriding public interest (as in whistleblowing), without an appropriate defence." The EFF says "If the real intent behind introducing expanded criminal sanctions is to address infringement on the Internet, this provision is not likely to do so, but is likely to cause significant collateral harm to consumers."

Locks In DMCA-Like Provisions – As the EFF notes (PDF) in its submission to the USTR, ACTA would "lock in" some of the controversial aspects of the DMCA that require legal enforcement against circumventing copy protection, etc. In other words, don't get too set on the idea of jailbreaking that iPhone.

ACTA could be used against legitimate medications – As I noted earlier, looking to crack down on counterfeit drugs is good. Going after legitimate "grey market" drugs, that's another story. Yet as Techdirt notes "there are very reasonable concerns that ACTA will be used to crack down, not on actual counterfeit medicines, but on "grey market" drugs – generic, but legal, copies of medicines. Some European nations, for example, already have a history of seizing shipments of perfectly legal generic drugs in passage to somewhere else."

That's 10, but I'm sure there are more. As I wrote on January 18th, sending SOPA/PIPA to the legislative trashbin for the year is great, but not enough. SOPA/PIPA are not the only laws that threaten the free and open Internet. There's plenty of bad policy to go around at the state, national and international levels. One round of annoyed phone calls to Congress is not going to do the trick. Even if it's too late to stop ACTA, there's even worse coming.

January212012

The IBM Powers of Ten video is a classic: as the stolid narrator ticks off powers of ten, the camera pulls back or zooms in and a new layer of complexity is revealed. We need a Powers of Ten video for SOPA.

At the initial scale, Hollywood lobbyists convinced Congress to push a bill through that would give Hollywood a measure of control over Internet sites by facilitating DNS takedowns, placing liability on site operators, and generally placing restrictions on Internet businesses designed to benefit existing content distributors. The depressingly smooth passage of the bill meant serious measures were called for: the blackout day. On that day, tens of millions of people became alerted to the consequences of SOPA and wrote to their representatives. SOPA has stalled, possibly died. And there was rejoicing.

Step back further and you see that Internet companies have set themselves up as new distribution channels while the old distribution companies were napping. Amazon can take an author's book and put it in consumers hands without ever involving a publisher, and Apple are following suit. Amazon, Apple, and Google all distribute movies. The legacy distribution companies are owned by the content production companies, and their "save our business" message muddles whether it's content production or legacy distribution that's threatened by these new Internet companies. Congress put their legislative thumb on the scales in a business dispute: old money vs new money, incumbent rent extractor vs upstart.

Step back further and you see that Congress thumbs the scales all the time. Between the money that can be earned from corporations and unions as a lobbyist after leaving Congress, and the money needed to run a campaign to be elected in the first place, there are a lot of reasons for Congressional representatives to be receptive to advances from monied interests. This means their legislative attention is not on the good of society or even the majority, but for the good of those willing to spend money to buy it. This is the big picture view, the root of the problem.

Congress is a flea pit. We can crack the fleas one at a time as they bite us, or we can clean house. I see widespread jubilation on the success of the SOPA skirmish, but only oneor two people thinking and talking about how we win the war. We win when we end this stream of Internet-breaking bills, and that will only happen when Congressional election campaigns are no longer paid for by monied interests. An independent Congress will still listen to business and unions, it just won't have to roll over and beg when money whistles.

This is, obviously, a bigger problem to solve. Lessig has called it a "generational" problem: pernicious money will take 30 years to eradicate, so we may end up cleaning up the country for our children. The size of the change doesn't make it impossible. It's a strategy problem, like every other: spend time and money at every power of ten, more where it's urgent and important, investing in R&D where a way forward isn't immediately obvious.

What does it mean to attack it at every power of ten? Simply:

Fight SOPA when it's urgent. Well done, immediate crisis is over!

Prepare to fight SOPA 2.0 and TPP and ACTA 2.0 and .... Until we fix Congress, there'll be more attempts to provide welfare for legacy distributors. Blackouts won't work. Get the holdouts (Facebook, Amazon, Twitter, etc.) to join in a sustainable coalition to oppose future fuckery. Obama's election was made possible by incredible tools for mobilizing voters; we need similarly evolved tools. Invest a little now so we don't have a cold start when the next bad bill comes along.

Buy online. Be the change you want to see: use your wallet to feed the companies you want to succeed, don't spend with the ones who want to break your Internet. Low-priority but ongoing.

Buy and read Lessig's new book Republic, Lost. He was ahead of the curve when he alerted us to problems with copyright law, and he's been ahead of the curve in his identification of corruption as an issue. This is research.

Join rootstrikers or any other group working to eliminate the root cause of Internet-breaking legislation: corruption. At election time, give them money instead of making campaign donations.

Invent the next thing we can all do which will bring us closer to change.

You'll notice I don't have "get Internet giants to lobby Congress" on my list. I'm sure they'll do that already, but I don't believe you can fight this fire with fire. They may need to lobby tactically, but strategically you fight fire by taking away its fuel or oxygen and that means taking obligation-creating campaign donations away from Congress.

If we don't do this, we'll keep scratching and crushing the fleas one at a time until we're miserable from all the bites. We need to zoom out a few powers of ten and clean house to solve the underlying problem.

January202012

This morning, Sen. Harry Reid (D-NV), the Senate Majority Leader, said in a statement that he would postpone next week's vote on the PROTECT IP Act (PIPA). Rep. Lamar Smith (R-TX) followed with a statement that he would also halt consideration of the Stop Online Piracy Act (SOPA). Collectively, millions of people rose up and told Washington that these bills shall not pass.

This outcome was driven by an unprecedented day of online protests on Wednesday of this week, and the resulting coverage on cable and broadcast news networks had an effect.

"Senator Reid made the right decision in postponing next week's vote on PIPA," said Center for Democracy and Technology president Leslie Harris. "It's time for a hard reset on this issue. We need a thoughtful and substantive process that includes all Internet stakeholders. We need to take a hard look at the facts and find solutions that honor the Internet's openness and its unique capacity for innovation and free expression. We are thankful for the efforts of Senator Ron Wyden who from the beginning stood against this bill; his early opposition and leadership gave voice to the important concerns of the Internet community."

Wikipedia, Google, BoingBoing, Reddit, O'Reilly Media and thousands of other websites, blogs and individual citizens asked their communities to take a stand and contact Washington. January 18, 2012, will go down as an historic day of online action. Consider the following statistics:

162 million Wikipedia page views, with some 8 million visitors using an online form to look up the address of their Congressional representatives.

Nearly 1,000 protesters outside New York's U.S. Senators' office in New York City.

The key metric to consider for impact of this action, however, was not measured in digital terms but by civic outcomes: 40 new opponents in Congress.

On Wednesday morning, according to ProPublica's SOPA Tracker, U.S. Senators and Representatives were 80-31 for SOPA and PIPA. By the end of the day, SOPA and PIPA had 68 supporters and 71 opponents in Congress. And by week's end, ProPublica's data showed 187 opponents and "leaning no."

"The amazing thing is that the power of these networks delivered," wrote Votizen co-founder David Binetti on TechCrunch. "By the end of the day, 25 Senators — including at least 5 former co-sponsors of the bill — had announced their opposition to SOPA. Think about that for just a second: A well-organized, well-funded, well-connected, well-experienced lobbying effort on Capitol Hill was outflanked by an ad-hoc group of rank amateurs, most of whom were operating independent of one another and on their spare time. Regardless where you stand on the issue — and effective copyright protection is an important issue — this is very good news for the future of civic engagement."

"Get ready to have this fight again"

Carl Franzen, in his must-read analysis of how the Web killed SOPA and PIPA, lays out a convincing case for why we should think of these bills as effectively "dead."

These bills are not completely in the grave, no matter what headlines you read today, although I can now say with confidence that they will not pass as currently drafted. In the months to come, keep an eye out for efforts to redraft them, cutting DNS filtering provisions or search engine blocks in an effort to make them acceptable to technology companies like Google.

It will be some months yet before Congress is "done" in this election year. No one I've consulted at the Center for Democracy and Technology or Public Knowledge thinks this is over. I'm certainly not convinced yet. The White House said that it would like to see action on anti-piracy legislation this year. Senator Reid had indicated that he would like to revisit legislation in February. It will be months until Congress really shuts down during the election year.

Clay Shirky made an important point today in his post on Hollywood and copyright today: "The risk now is not that SOPA will pass. The risk is that we'll think we've won. We haven't; they'll be back. Get ready to have this fight again."

Video of Shirky's TED Talk on why SOPA is a bad idea is embedded below:

While the power of the Internet to drive media coverage and collective action mattered in Washington this week, it's also critically important to recognize that but for the efforts of Senator Ron Wyden (D-OR), Rep. Darrell Issa (R-CA), Rep. Jason Chaffetz (R-UT), Rep. Jared Polis (R-CO) and Rep. Zoe Logren (D-CA), I believe SOPA and PIPA would likely have passed.

Senator Wyden put a critical hold on the PROTECT IP Act after it sailed out of the Senate Judiciary Committee. The four representatives proposed dozens of amendments to SOPA in a marathon, days-long markup session that effectively filibustered the bill, delaying it until the House came back into session in January. That delay enabled hundreds of organizations and individuals, including newspaper editors, human rights advocates, academics, engineers and public interest groups, to rally to save the Internet as we know it.

"Supporters of the Internet deserve credit for pressing advocates of SOPA and PIPA to back away from an effort to ram through controversial legislation," Issa said in an emailed statement.

The statement continued:

"Over the last two months, the intense popular effort to stop SOPA and PIPA has defeated an effort that once looked unstoppable but lacked a fundamental understanding of how Internet technologies work.

"Postponing the Senate vote on PIPA removes the imminent threat to the Internet, but it's not over yet. Copyright infringement remains a serious problem and any solution must be targeted, effective, and consistent with how the Internet works. After inviting all stakeholders to help improve American intellectual property protections, I have introduced the bipartisan OPEN Act with Senator Rob Wyden which can be read and commented on at KeepTheWebOPEN.com. It is clear that Congress needs to have more discussion and education about the workings of the Internet before it moves forward on sweeping legislation to address intellectual property theft on the Internet. I look forward to working with my colleagues and stakeholders to achieve a needed consensus about the way forward."

Unexplored territory

In the meantime, everyone who participated in this week's unprecedented day of online action should know that the action mattered. If you'd asked me about the prospects for the passage of these bills back in December — and many people did, after I wrote a feature in November that highlighted the threat these anti-piracy bills presented to the Internet, security and freedom of expression online — I estimated that it was quite likely. So did Chris Dodd, the head of the Motion Picture Association of America, who told the New York Times that these passage of these bills was "considered by many to be a 'slam dunk'.'"

We're now in unexplored territory. I've been writing about how the Internet affects government and government affects the Internet for years now. This week was clearly a tipping point in that space. The voices of the people, expressed in calls, letters, tweets, petitions and protests, were heard in Washington.

We saw unprecedented mobilization across the Internet, enabled by an increasingly networked society, social media and a number of tech companies and website owners taking principled stands in support of freedom of expression and the Open Web.

I support the right of Internet companies and services to use their platforms to educate their users about proposed legislation that would harm a free and open Internet, as we understand that term today. It's important now that those same companies and citizens work together to craft an alternative to SOPA, as Rob Preston, the editor-in-chief of Information Week, argued today. The problem of money, politics and SOPA is a thorny one, as John Battelle wrote this morning:

"We can't afford to not engage with Washington anymore ... Silicon Valley is waking up to the fact that we have to be part of the process in Washington — for too long we've treated 'Government' as damage, and we've routed around it."

Just so. We need the smartest minds of our generation thinking about how to help make society work better, creating tools to help others do so and using them to help millions of citizens still struggling to make their way out of the Great Recession. According to the Bureau of Labor and Statistics, there are more than 3 million unfilled jobs. Let's figure out how to fill them.

We need our elected leaders not to focus on big government or small government but a smarter government, more innovative government that uses the power of technology to empower civil society and the collective intelligence of its citizens to adapt to our rapidly changed world. This is precisely what the open government movement that we've been writing about at O'Reilly over the past five years is focused upon.

One of the most unheralded successes of this week's SOPA and PIPA victories was the role that pioneering open government and government transparency efforts had in enabling the protests to take off. Just a few weeks ago, few online had heard of either bill, almost no one could understand their potential impact, and even fewer had read the actual bills.

But thanks to efforts like OpenCongress, which routinely creates valuable resources like this look at the money behind SOPA through its support from the Sunlight Foundation and the Participatory Politics Foundation, the web was able to see who was helping pay for the law. Giving that information a place to live on the web was a fundamental step that enabled powerful demonstrations like the GoDaddy protests in which thousands of users moved their business from the company in protest of its support of SOPA. (I have some misgivings about the tactics and effectiveness of that particular protest, but overall as a first example of the organization and focus of those who would object to SOPA, it was inarguably powerful.)

There are incredibly difficult challenges that face us as a country and as a global community, from jobs to healthcare to the environment to civil liberties to smoldering wars around the world. If more leaders in Silicon Valley and the rest of the country heed Battelle's call, we'll have a chance at solving some of the problems ahead.

What happened this week, however, will reinvigorate the notion that participating in the civic process matters.

A portion of the Internet said "no" to SOPA (the Stop Online Piracy Act) and PIPA (the Protect IP Act) this week with a powerful campaign that involved many websites, including O'Reilly, "going dark" to protest the pending legislation.

The protests didn't just involve the temporary shut-down of websites, however. People were voicing their opinions as well. According to Twitter, there were around 3.9 million tweets about SOPA on January 18, the day of the protest.

Fred Benenson has visualized a portion of those SOPA tweets on GigaPan. With the tool, you can view top SOPA-related tweets and their associated Twitter users.

Check out the massive 32,000-pixel x 32,000-pixel version of the visualization here (be sure to view it in full-screen mode). Benenson has also put together a post that outlines the tools and process behind his work.

Found a great visualization? Tell us about it

This post is part of an ongoing series exploring visualizations. We're always looking for leads, so please drop a line if there's a visualization you think we should know about.

Strata 2012 — The 2012 Strata Conference, being held Feb. 28-March 1 in Santa Clara, Calif., will offer three full days of hands-on data training and information-rich sessions. Strata brings together the people, tools, and technologies you need to make data work.

While the final results are still being tabulated, EFF alone helped users send over 1,000,000 emails to Congress, and countless more came from other organizations. Web traffic briefly brought down the Senate website. 162 million people visited Wikipedia and eight million looked up their representatives’ phone numbers. Google received over 7 million signatures on their petition.

That Murdoch doesn’t get the Internet shouldn’t surprise anyone who’s observed his recent efforts to control it. It’s a campaign that goes well beyond Murdoch’s MySpace miscalculation to include tens of millions of dollars spent on Washington lobbyists who are intent on passing laws that undermine the Internet’s open architecture. And now millions of people are joining to protest Murdoch and his ilk and protect our fundamental freedom to connect, link to and share information without censors or filters.

Over a century ago Thomas Edison got the patent for a device which would “do for the eye what the phonograph does for the ear”. He called it the Kinetoscope. He was not only amongst the first to record video, he was also the first person to own the copyright to a motion picture. Because of Edisons patents for the motion pictures it was close to financially impossible to create motion pictures in the North american east coast. The movie studios therefor relocated to California, and founded what we today call Hollywood. The reason was mostly because there was no patent. There was also no copyright to speak of, so the studios could copy old stories and make movies out of them – like Fantasia, one of Disneys biggest hits ever.

Yesterday was a defining moment for the global Internet community. The effects of the massive online blackout in protest of U.S. Internet blacklistlegislation, SOPA and PIPA (H.R. 3261 and S. 968), were felt around the world as countless numbers of websites, including Google, Wikipedia, Mozilla, Reddit, BoingBoing, Flickr, Wired, and many others joined in the global action against over-broad and poorly drafted copyright laws that would break the fundamental architecture of the Internet. To quote [pdf] last year’s landmark Report of the UN Special Rapporteur on Freedom of Expression and Opinion: “…Censorship measures should never be delegated to a private entity, and [..] no one should be held liable for content on the Internet of which they are not the author…” The massive opposition from both companies and individuals around the world demonstrates how much these and similar laws would hurt business and innovation, and most importantly, restrict online free expression.

But SOPA and PIPA are really only the tip of the iceberg. The same forces behind these domestic U.S. laws have continued to both push for other states to pass similar domestic laws, as well as to secretly negotiate international trade agreements that would force signatory nations to conform to the same legal standards. The Anti-Counterfeiting Trade Agreement (ACTA), Trans-Pacific Partnership (TPP), Ley Doring (Mexico), Ley Sinde (Spain), Ley Hadopi (France) are only a few examples. Members of the copyright industry lobby such as the Motion Picture Association of America (MPAA) and the International Federation of Phonographic Industries (IFPI) are funneling huge amounts of resources into getting states to pass inherently flawed copyright enforcement laws. What results are laws that encroach on national sovereignty, overstep traditional principles of jurisdiction, harm innovation, and ultimately violate users’ rights.

Digital civil liberties activists and organizations internationally found the day of online action to be a golden opportunity to educate their constituents on the effects such laws would have on websites in their countries and the future of the free and open Internet. Recognizing the common thread of overbroad enforcement and technical defects that runs through these bills, the following organizations have taken a stance against the efforts of special interests to censor citizens and kill innovation in the name of preserving the entertainment industry’s business model.

In recent years major copyright industry lobbyists have sought stronger power to enforce their copyrights across the world to preserve their business models. These efforts have been underway in a number of international fora including the G8 summit, transnational trade agreements such as ACTA and TPP, and the AnnualSpecial 301 Process–a report with tiered “watch lists” of countries with supposedly deficient intellectual property laws and enforcement policies. As U.S. PublicInterestGroups and EUScholars have noted, SOPA includes a provision designed to further entrench U.S. IP rightsholders’ influence on other countries’ laws and policies. While the passage of SOPA and PIPA could certainly have longstanding consequences for societies and economies around the world, we hope the enormous attention shed on these two Internet blacklist bills raises international awareness of the impact of these copyright enforcement proposals sought by U.S. IP rightsholders worldwide.

This site has gone dark today in protest of the Stop Online Piracy Act (SOPA) and PROTECT-IP Act (PIPA) discussed in the US Congress, as well as the Anti-Counterfeiting Trade Agreement (ACTA), currently debated in the European Parliament. These initiatives amount to a global attempt to censor the Internet in the name of copyright.

[SOPA and PIPA] is yet one more example of the harms that can result for an overly aggressive, no holds barred, U.S.-drivenIPagenda. It imposes more restrictive standards on foreign intermediaries than the U.S. requires of its own Internet companies through its DMCA notice-takedown regime.

The Chilean digital rights advocacy group, DerechosDigitales, also framed their position against SOPA in light of the overreaching international copyright enforcement regimes:

So while many of us speak out against the U.S. bill, the governments of Chile, Peru, New Zealand, Australia, Brunei, Singapore, Malaysia and the United States are moving quickly on a new international agreement that reproduces one of the greatest threats of SOPA: censorship of Internet sites for possible infringements of copyright, giving police powers to Internet service providers. (Read here and here in Spanish)

If only half of the proposed legislation comes into force, this is going to have a huge negative impact on the internet. ACTA, PIPA and SOPA are of similar kind: Music and film industries try to destroy the net slice for slice – the so called salami tactics.

SOPA and PIPA would disrupt national sovereignty and harm local economies

In countries where policymakers are currently debating the need for website blocking proposals, the adoption of SOPA or PIPA will create pressure to mirror U.S. law regardless of any empirical evidence of its effectiveness or appropriateness. What is most disconcerting for individuals and enterprises outside the U.S. is the way in which SOPA and PIPA could effectively override their countries' national laws and impose more restrictive standards on foreign Internet intermediaries than it does on U.S. Internet companies.

50 humanrightsorganizations from around the world signed a letter to U.S. Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid in opposition to PIPA, highlighting its serious jurisdictional and freedom of expression concerns:

…Creating a mechanism that requires a representative of a website to make a court appearance in the U.S. in order to defend themselves against an allegation of infringement would disproportionately impact smaller online communities and start-ups based abroad that do not have the capacity to address concerns in the United States.

OpenRightsGroupbased in the United Kingdom also emphasized the due process implications of these overbroad U.S. Internet blacklist bills:

There are two reasons that Open Rights Group are supporting a protest aimed at US laws. First, the overly broad definitions and wording of the bills put any websites at risk of action from US authorities. Second, we face many of the issues with these copyright-related bills here in the UK: inappropriate enforcement measures, in particular website blocking; overly-broad or vague definitions and wording; and weaknesses in due process and redress.

MichaelGeist, a leading Canadian legal scholar on digital civil liberties and copyright, drewattention to the impact SOPA would have in Canada and its parallels with ACTA and TPP:

While SOPA is proposed U.S. legislation, it has implications for all Canadians, including provisions that treat all Canadian IP addresses as if they were subject to U.S. jurisdiction. Moreover, Canada faces the same relentless copyright lobbying campaign. From the much-criticized digital lock rules found in Bill C-11 to the Anti-Counterfeiting Trade Agreement to the proposal to extend the term of copyright protection in the Trans Pacific Partnership, Canadian copyright policy is increasingly shaped by the same groups promoting SOPA.

[PIPA/SOPA] would raise the cost of participation on [social media and other user generated sites] for all users worldwide, and could force many social media projects to shut down, especially smaller websites and businesses.

As Canadian Internet users and online innovators, we have a lot to lose if SOPA is passed. SOPA could fundamentally reshape the Internet in the U.S., Canada, and the rest of the world. … Tell Prime Minister Stephen Harper and Gary Doer (Canada’s Ambassador to the U.S.) that Canadians are against SOPA.

Threatens human rights and access to information worldwide

Most of the criticism regarding SOPA and PIPA has focused on the way the bills would institute massive online censorship and fundamentally break the Internet in the name of intellectual property enforcement. These bills would encompass any foreign site accessible from the U.S. and give corporations and other private parties new powers to censor websites from around the world with court orders that would cut off domain names, payment processors, and advertisers.

InternetGovernanceCaucus, an international coalition of civil society organizations and individuals around the world participating at the UN Internet Governance Forum reaffirmed the free speech implications of Internet blacklist legislation:

We have made a decision to join the black out in protest of the arbitrary censorship of the Internet which violates people’s rights to responsibly use the Internet. We note with increasing concern the the various censorship mechanisms around the world including but not limited to India’s Intermediary Guideline Rules (IGR) nor the United States of America’s Stop Online Piracy Act (SOPA)and Protect IP Act (PIPA). Any country’s censorship mechanisms affect ordinary Internet users all over the world.

AmnestyInternational, a globally recognized organization fighting injustice and promoting human rights, noted that “[PIPA and SOPA] would create a powerful and unprecedented market incentive to censor user generated content. And their passage would signal very clearly to countries around the world that it is OK to sacrifice some rights in the name of some other good.”

If SOPA/PIPA become law, sites like Greenpeace.org could go dark simply because one of our corporate targets files a claim that its intellectual property rights have been violated. No proof required, no court hearing.

Article 19, an international freedom of expression organization, stated:

[PIPA/SOPA] will stifle free speech, innovation and undermine Internet security, all for the sake of Hollywood studios.

Wednesday’s blackout day signifies a new era for the global digital civil liberties movement. Through blogs, tweets, and posts, thousands of organizations, activists, and individuals truly made it the success that it was. This has only been a sample of the great advocacy work that took place yesterday. Here are some other organizations, groups, activists and even political parties who participated on this very important day for the future of the Internet:

While we believe that online piracy by foreign websites is a serious problem that requires a serious legislative response, we will not support legislation that reduces freedom of expression, increases cybersecurity risk, or undermines the dynamic, innovative global Internet.

If that sounds like a careful effort to walk a thin line, it is: Some of the president’s biggest supporters in Hollywood and Silicon Valley and beyond are sharply divided over the bills, and the White House needs a way to keep both sides happy.

January172012

On January 24, 2012, the Senate will be voting about the PROTECT IP Act, also known as PIPA. This legislation can be used to effectively censor any website on the internet that accepts user content, regardless of whether they are actually infringing on copyrights in any way, shape, or form.

On January 18, 2012, Congress will once again discuss the Stop Online Piracy Act. SOPA not only allows a court to order the blocking of a website through measures such as DNS blocking or other 'appropriate measures', but also allows a private party to cut off funding to a website without court involvement.

Both of these proposals are incredibly dangerous to the internet and to the freedom of speech of individuals. The blocking mechanisms that are defined (such as DNS blocking) are so trivial that any dedicated or tech-savvy 'pirate' will easily circumvent them, but other sites that have nothing to do with 'piracy' will suffer; as their users are often not computer literate enough to bypass SOPA. Ironically this legislation does not affect the people it is targeting. Even if you don't live in the United States, you will be affected by this legislation, as much of the core internet infrastructure is located in the US.

Apart from the technical blocking measures, another serious problem is the ability of a private entity to shut down the money flow of a website without any involvement of a court. By making payment providers and advertisement networks liable for the websites they provide services to, they can be bullied into cutting off services to any website that is accused of infringing copyright; whether guilty of this act or not, it does not matter. This would allow companies to shut down and censor almost any site they don't approve of without even going to court - after all, most sites can't survive without a source of income.

On January 18, between 8am and 8pm EST (or 13:00 and 01:00 UTC), Reddit will be blacking out their website in protest of SOPA and PROTECT IP. We request all website administrators worldwide - and especially those running large user-content websites - to black out their website at the same time, to voice their opposition of SOPA and PROTECT IP. This legislation may very well not only change the future of the internet as a whole, but also change the future of YOUR website. Act against it before it's too late.

We are Anonymous.We are legion.We do not forgive.We do not forget.Expect us.

If you don't own a website, you can still add a banner to your Twitter profile image to show your opposition of SOPA: http://www.blackoutsopa.org/

To learn more about the financial contributions of the media and internet industries to the various involved politicians involved in the SOPA vote, and their actual stance, have a look at http://projects.propublica.org/sopa/ .

At Global Voices, we understand that we, collectively, are the Internet. Our individual participation is what makes the Internet a global conversation of startling depth and variety, but this is possible only because of its open technical and legal structure. Unfortunately, there are powerful corporate and government forces who would prefer to see the openness and accessibility of the web restricted. They seek to deploy censorship and surveillance in the name of enforcing copyright, employing the very tools used to censor the Internet in authoritarian countries, such as China, Iran, and Syria.

Ignoring the warnings of citizens and technologists, United States lawmakers are considering two bills, the Stop Online Piracy Act (SOPA) and the Protect IP Act (PIPA), that are a real and dangerous threat to the openness of the web everywhere in the world. In response, the Global Voices community has decided to join websites such as Wikipedia, Reddit and BoingBoing in “going dark” and will black out the Global Voices Advocacy site for 12 hours on January 18, and display a banner on other Global Voices sites that provides more information about the proposed bills.

We are an international volunteer community dedicated to amplifying citizen media from around the world. In the last six years, we’ve produced more than 75,000 posts that link to blogs and other citizen content for readers in over 20 languages. Our content is free to use, and free to share. We rely on the open Internet to carry out our mission, and on social media and citizen media websites that allow for simple publication and sharing of content. Platforms like WordPress, Wikipedia, Twitter, YouTube, Flickr, Reddit, Tumblr, and many other online media production communities host content on which we base much of our work.

The passage of SOPA and PIPA by the United States Congress and Senate would force social media platforms and other web sites that host user-generated content to pro-actively monitor and censor users to prevent them from posting words or images that may violate copyrights. It would raise the cost of participation on these sites for all users worldwide, and could force many social media projects to shut down, especially smaller websites and businesses.

We are concerned this law would will inflict broad damage on the work of digital activists living under repressive regimes, as well as restrict basic speech freedoms around the world. Current copyright laws are occasionally misused in the U.S, and can result in de facto speech restrictions. In countries with less independent judicial systems, abuse of copyright law to repress activism is both simple and frequent.

Global Voices contributors in many countries face increasingly aggressive surveillance and censorship. Several are in prison or exile because of their online activities. Passage of these bills will send a clear message that the US government believes it is acceptable to monitor and censor citizens to identify “infringing activity” which too often is equated with political and religious dissent. Passage of SOPA and PIPA would also give the United States government a disproportionate amount of power to determine the course of the Internet. The result will be a more dangerous world for bloggers and activists, and less free speech for all.

Even though the current version of SOPA was put indefinitely on hold this week, PIPA, the Senate version of the bill, is still alive. And the issues and forces that are driving the passage of a law remain. For this reason, Global Voices is joining the Internet blackout on January 18, 2011.

If you are an American citizen, Americancensorship.org can help you to quickly communicate with your elected representatives, or help you to join the strike. Learn more about the strike at www.sopastrike.com.

Wikipedia is among hundreds of websites that will be showing just how they feel about SOPA by going dark Wednesday.

The English-language version of Wikipedia, the online encyclopedia, will be shut down for 24 hours in protest of the Stop Online Piracy Act and PIPA, the Protect Intellectual Property Act, now working their way through Congress.

Jimmy Wales, site co-founder, told the BBC's Martha Kearney on Tuesday morning that "tomorrow from midnight Washington D.C. time until midnight the entire day of Wednesday, we're going to blank out" the English version of Wikipedia and post a message of protest.

He told Kearney that the legislation makes "something like Wikipedia essentially impossible ... if the provider has to police everything that everyone is doing on the site."

Websites taking part in the so-called SOPA Strike include Mozilla, Reddit, WordPress and Boing Boing.

Twitter was hopping Tuesday morning with the news:

From the BBC's Philippia Thomas: "#Twitter chief says 'Closing a global business in reaction to a single-issue national politics is foolish'. How about that #Wikipedia?"

Greenpeace tweeted: " 'We're sorry, you're not allowed to read this.' Join us in saying no to corporate censorship of the internet."

The MPAA and others who support the law say the Internet operators have it all wrong. As the Los Angeles Times reported on Tuesday:

The Motion Picture Assn. of America and others driving the legislation said real progress had been made toward creating a law that would protect intellectual property. The advocates said misinformation is inflaming passions on the Web while doing nothing to solve the problem of piracy.

January162012

There are many arguments against SOPA and PIPA that are based on the potential harm they will do to the Internet. (There's a comprehensive outline of those arguments here.) At O'Reilly, we argue that they are also bad for the content industries that have proposed them, and bad industrial policy as a whole.

The term "piracy" implies that the wide availability of unauthorized copies of copyrighted content is the result of bad actors preying on the legitimate market. But history teaches us that it is primarily a
result of market failure, the unwillingness or inability of existing companies to provide their product at a price or in a manner that potential customers want. In the 19th century, British authors like
Charles Dickens and Anthony Trollope railed against piracy by American publishers, who republished their works by re-typesetting "early sheets" obtained by whatever method possible. Sometimes these works were authorized, sometimes not. In an 1862 letter to the Athenaeum, Fletcher Harper, co-founder of American publisher Harper Brothers, writing in reply to Anthony Trollope's complaint that his company had published an unauthorized edition of Trollope's novel Orley Farm,noted:

"In the absence of an international copyright, a system has grown up in this country which though it may not be perfect still secures to authors more money than any other system that can be devised in the present state of the law.... We cannot consent to its overthrow till some better plan shall have been devised."

America went on to become the largest market in the world for copyrighted content.

That is exactly the situation today. At O'Reilly, we have published ebooks DRM-free for the better part of two decades. We've watched the growth of this market from its halting early stages to its robust growth today. More than half of our ebook sales now come from overseas, in markets we were completely unable to serve in print. While our books appear widely on unauthorized download sites, our legitimate sales are exploding. The greatest force in reporting unauthorized copies to us is our customers, who value what we do and want us to succeed. Yes, there is piracy, but our embrace of the internet's unparalleled ability to reach new customers "though it may not be perfect still secures to authors more money than any other system that can be devised."

The solution to piracy must be a market solution, not a government intervention, especially not one as ill-targeted as SOPA and PIPA. We already have laws that prohibit unauthorized resale of copyrighted material, and forward-looking content providers are developing products, business models, pricing, and channels that can and will eventually drive pirates out of business by making content readily available at a price consumers want to pay, and that ends up growing
the market.

Policies designed to protect industry players who are unwilling or unable to address unmet market needs are always bad policies. They retard the growth of new business models, and prop up inefficient companies. But in the end, they don't even help the companies they try to protect. Because those companies are trying to preserve old business models and pricing power rather than trying to reach new customers, they ultimately cede the market not to pirates but to
legitimate players who have more fully embraced the new opportunity. We've already seen this story play out in the success of Apple and Amazon. While the existing music companies were focused on fighting file sharing, Apple went on to provide a compelling new way to buy and enjoy music, and became the largest music retailer in the world. While book publishers have been fighting the imagined threat of piracy, Amazon, not pirates, has become the biggest threat to their business by offering authors an alternative way to reach the market without recourse to their former gatekeepers.

Hollywood too, has a history of fighting technologies, such as the VCR, which developed into a larger market than the one the industry was originally trying to protect.

In short, SOPA and PIPA not only harm the internet, they support existing content companies in their attempt to hold back innovative business models that will actually grow the market and deliver new
value to consumers.